Russian Wisdom Quotes

All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?

Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable… More briefly – a word is translatable, its sound is not.

How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

Looking back now, I would say that this was one of the first valuable lessons I learned, and one that would be useful in my future line of work. Sometimes things go wrong. It is inevitable. But it is a mistake to waste time and energy worrying about events that you cannot influence. Once they have happened, let them go.

For an addict there is one pleasure of which no one can deprive him—his ability to spend his time in absolute solitude. And solitude means deep, significant thought; it means, calm, contemplation—and wisdom.

Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.

Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom. But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative. To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)

To understand Putin, you must understand Russian history. To understand Zelensky, you must understand Ukraine history.

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

All revolutions have liberté, égalité, fraternité, and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise; mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized. They have the intoxicating illusion of personifying the will of the people, which means they assume the people is monolithic. They are Manicheans, dividing the world into two camps: light and darkness, the revolution and its enemies. They despise all traditions, received wisdom, icons, and superstition. They believe society can be a tabula rasa on which the revolution will write.

To a foreigner, it must have seemed that Russia had become the land of ten thousand lines. For there were lines at the tram stops, lines before the grocer, lines at the agencies of labor, education, and housing. But in point of fact, there were not ten thousand lines, or even ten. There was one all-encompassing line, which wound across the country and back through time. This had been Lenin’s greatest innovation: a line that, like the Proletariat itself, was universal and infinite. He established it by decree in 1917 and personally took the first slot as his comrades jostled to line up behind him. One by one every Russian took his place, and the line grew longer and longer until it shared all of the attributes of life. In it friendships were formed and romances kindled; patience was fostered; civility practiced; even wisdom attained. If one is willing to stand in line for eight hours to purchase a loaf of bread, the lone figure thought, what is an hour or two to see the corpse of a hero free of charge?

Nineteenth-century Russian literature, swooning with compassion for the suffering brother, had created for Nerzhin, and for everyone reading it for the first time, the image of a haloed, silvery-haired People, embodying all wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual grandeur. But that was far away, on bookshelves; it was somewhere else, in the villages and fields at the crossroads of the nineteenth century. The heavens unfolded, the twentieth century came, and those places had long since ceased to exist under Russian skies.

And a large man at the end of the table stood up and drank to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We were beginning to understand the quality of Roosevelt’s memory in the world, and the great sense of tragedy at his death. And I remembered a story that I had heard one time. Within a week of the death of Lincoln, the news of his death had penetrated even to the middle of Africa, sometimes on the drums, and sometimes carried by runners. The news traveled that a world tragedy had taken place. And it seems to us that it does not matter what the Roosevelt-haters think or say, it doesn’t even matter, actually, what Roosevelt was in the flesh. What does matter is that his name is throughout the world a symbol of wisdom, and kindness, and understanding. In the minds of little people all over the world he has ceased to be a man and has become a principle. And those men who attack him now, and attack his memory, do not hurt his name at all, but simply define themselves as the mean, the greedy, the selfish, and the stupid. Roosevelt’s name is far beyond the reach of small minds and dirty hands

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves.

We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. The world considers this undiscriminating; it would like to see clouds over evil people and is offended when they go unpunished. We are told that outcasts and harlots enter the kingdom of God before many who are perfunctorily righteous. Again unfair, the world thinks; respectable people should head the procession. We are told that the gate to salvation is narrow. The world would prefer it to be broad. We are told to be as carefree as birds and flowers. The world counsels prudence. We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, and the well-born who are happy. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said that a wind of freedom blows through these teachings that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect them by postponement—not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message.

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles. Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state—as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy, especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological similarity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexation; but it has not created and aura of pseudomysticism. And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretive speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is consistently checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.

As Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey: “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” In the age of our Founders, this human impulse to demand the right of co-creating shared wisdom accounted for the ferocity with which the states demanded protection for free access to the printing press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. General George Washington, in a speech to officers of the army in 1783, said, “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” But the twentieth century brought its own bitter lessons. The new and incredibly powerful electronic media that began to replace the printing press—first radio and film and then television—were used to indoctrinate millions of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and others with elaborate abstract ideologies that made many of them deaf, blind, and numb to the systematic leading of tens of millions of their fellow human beings “to the slaughter.

Historically, when oppressed Jews would pray for a political change, for a new king, the new king would often turn out to be worse than the previous one. They applied the old wisdom and they were right. In fact, the Soviet regime was worse than the years we lived under the Romanian regime. Luckily, we did not fully comprehend, in those first weeks, what suffering we were facing. The Russian troops, making their appearance that first day, were poorly dressed and shod; they spoke only Russian or Ukrainian. Some of them asked passers-by what time it was and grabbed their watches. Local communists and the ubiquitous opportunists started to occupy high positions, as initially, everything was improvised

I love education and learning and knowledge, but give me a man with wisdom any time.

I revealed my affection towards my former employer and felt sick at myself for betraying him. My grandfather stood and poured me another tall glass. He offered me a sour tomato to take the edge off of the vodka. Pappy pulled his chair up next to mine then put his oversized arm around my shoulder and offered me his wisdom. "Feel no pity for this man James," he whispered. "A fool and his money are lucky to come together in the first place. More so, it's the responsibility of much smarter, more dubious men to party them," he finished.

Beneath a common banner of classically liberal ideals, countless tastes and traditions may mingle and mutate into ever new and exciting flavors. Thus would be born a homeland where the Sufi dances with the Breslover round the neon jungle of Times Square, where the Baptist of Alabama nods along to the merry melodies of Klezmer, where the secular humanist combs the Christian gospels and poems of Rumi for their many pearls of wisdom, where the Guatemalan college student learns to read Marx and Luxemburg in their original German, where the Russian refugee freely markets her own art painted in the style of Van Gogh and Monet, where the Italian chef tosses up a Lambi stew for his Haitian wife’s birthday while the operas of Verdi and Puccini play on his radio, where two brothers in exile share the wine of the Galilee and Golan while listening to the oud music of Nablus and Nazareth, where the Buddhist and the stoner hike through redwood trails and swap thoughts of life and death beneath a star-spangled sky. In this America, only the polyglot sets the lingua franca, the bully pulpit yields to the poets café, decent discourse finds favor over any cocksure shouting match, no library is so uniform as to betray to a tee its owner’s beliefs, no citizen is so selfish as to live for only themself nor so weak of will as to live only for others, and such a land—as yet a dream deferred, but still a dream we may seize—such a land would truly be worthy of you and me.

Instead of wisdom -- experience, bare, That does not slake thirst, is not wet. Youth's gone -- like a Sunday prayer. Is it mine to forget? On how many desert roads have searched I With him who wasn't dear for me, How many bows gave in church I For him, who had well loved me. I've become more oblivious than inviting, Quietly years swim. Lips unkissed, eyes unsmiling -- Nothing will give me back him.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, trapped in the diversity delusion, knows none of this. And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

He who on earth through the Holy Spirit dwells in the love of God will be with the Lord in the other world, too, for love cannot disappear. But lest by reasoning we fall into error, let us humble ourselves according to the word of the Lord: 'Become as little children, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Russian critics: '‘He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom … that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.

Come my friend. Come and walk with me in the path ahead that awaits you with open arms – the path of humanism – the path where every pedestrian is simply a human, not a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Atheist, Mexican, American, Canadian, British, Australian, Russian, Asian, African, European or anything else.

had been Lenin’s greatest innovation: a line that, like the Proletariat itself, was universal and infinite. He established it by decree in 1917 and personally took the first slot as his comrades jostled to line up behind him. One by one every Russian took his place, and the line grew longer and longer until it shared all of the attributes of life. In it friendships were formed and romances kindled; patience was fostered; civility practiced; even wisdom attained. If

.. the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first let's become a "majority." The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs.

In the poem, Inanna, unveiled, sees her own mysterious depth, Ereshkigal, who glares back at her. She has an immediate, full experience of her underworld self. That naked moment is like the fifth scene in the Villa of Mysteries where the faun, looking into a mirror bowl, sees reflected back a mask of terrible Dionysus as lord of the underworld. It is the moment of self-confrontation for the goddess of active life and love. Archetypally, these eyes of death are implacable and profound, seeing an immediateness that finds pretense, ideals, even individuality and relatedness, irrelevant. They also hold and enable the mystery of a radically different, precultural mode of perception. Like the eyes in the skulls around the house of the Russian nature goddess and witch, Baba-Yaga, they perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself and our dreams, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays. Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. Before the vision of Ereshkigal, however, objective reality is unmasked. It is nothing"Neti,neti," as the Sanskrit says and yet everything, the place of paradox behind the veil of the Great Goddess and the temple of wisdom. These eyes see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.

But not many scientists would have done what Pavlov next did.And that was to spend the rest of his long life giving stress-induced nervous breakdowns to dogs, after which he would try to reverse the break downs, all the while keeping careful experimental records. He found (1) that he could classify dogs so as to predict how easily a particular dog would breakdown (2) that the dogs hardest to break down were also the hardest to return to their pre breakdown state; (3) that any dog could be broken down; and (4) that he couldn't reverse a breakdown except by reimposing stress. Now, practically everyone is revolted by such experimental treatment of man's friend, the dog. Moreover, Pavlov was Russian and did his last work under the Communists. And maybe those facts account for the present extreme, widespread ignorance of Pavlov's last work. The two Freudian psychiatrists with whom I tried many years ago to discuss this work had never heard of it. And the dean of a major medical school actually asked me, several years ago, if any of Pavlov's experiments were "repeatable" in experiments of other researchers. Obviously, Pavlov is now a sort of forgotten hero in medical science.

We lose very little by taking a beat to consider our own thoughts. Is this really so bad? What do I really know about this person? Why do I have such strong feelings here? Is anxiety really adding much to the situation? What’s so special about __________? By asking these questions—by putting our impressions to the test as Epictetus recommends—we’re less likely to be carried away by them or make a move on a mistaken or biased one. We’re still free to use our instincts, but we should always, as the Russian proverb says, “trust, but verify.

... we know that the Americans are not far off, and everyone, Germans included, is longing for them to arrive. A Russian woman, the prison's unchallenged fount of all wisdom and general repository of all the latest 'news', has announced that they will be here for Easter. Easter falls on 1 April. Although it smacks a little of an April Fool's joke, her prophecy gains credence. The Americans will be here for Easter!

I am not interested in peddling myself as an expert, all I am interested in is to make sure that when the humans look at the mirror they see a human, instead of seeing a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist, an American, an European, a Russian, an Asian or anything else.

Of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live. ‘Not only is the novelist nobody's spokesman,’ wrote Milan Kundera, ‘but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Treating things as disposable used to be an attitude associated with the rich. When Russian aristocrats hurled their wineglasses into the fireplace after drinking from them, they were flaunting their wealth. Today, though, using disposable items, or treating things as disposable, is often more economical in terms of both money and time. So while the guiding idea of living cheaply remains central to the notion of frugal simplicity, the methods of achieving this goal have to take into account changing times.

Yet, in spite of such pervasive, even relentless injustice, the best Russians I know display a remarkable inner strength and a commitment to living with as much dignity as they can.

For me, the most compelling and horrifying description of an individual contemplating suicide is found in Graham Greene’s extraordinary personal essay “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard.” Beset by unmitigated feelings of emptiness in his teenage years, Greene would steal off with his brother’s pistol to Berkhamsted Common and there play Russian roulette: He would insert a single bullet, spin the chamber, press the gun to his head, and pull the trigger. When there was only a click (and there was every time he tried it), he would experience an overwhelming feeling of happiness. “It was as if a light had been turned on . . . I felt that life contained an infinite number of possibilities.

HOW TO BE COOL Swim. Most swimming pools are quite a bit cooler than the body; lakes and oceans definitely are. Incorporate swimming into your regular exercise regimen. Do a polar bear plunge. Many cities have cold water swim clubs; look one up and join it. Cold water plunges are more fun with other people. Visit the baths. Russian, Turkish, or Korean, proper baths have cold plunges. Some gyms have cold plunges too—if they don’t, a cold shower will do. Take cold showers. If it’s too intense to start cold, then start warm and gradually turn it colder. It helps you wake up, too. Build a cold plunge. Fill a bathtub or large plastic tub with cool water. Add ice. Enjoy. Turn down the thermostat. Let the air be a touch cold rather than a touch hot. Others can choose to wear extra clothing if desired. This also improves alertness and saves money. Exercise outdoors. Whatever the activity, do it outside. With gloves and a hat you can wear only a t-shirt, even in winter.

I await my time. I sit, I cook, I spin, with downcast eyes I am silent and let him speak. This is fine. I await my time. Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider. Silently, silently spin. Let the fly buzz. Before I ate her and put on her skin I lay across the stove in my hut, the hut standing on a chicken leg, and I waited, and they came to me, and became my food, and in the end she came too, the one I wanted, and instead of swallowing her I dived inside and let her swallow me. It doesn’t matter what it looks like! I ate her even as I allowed her to eat me. It’s a special digestive trick: a reverse takeover of the feeder by the fed. And so farewell, chicken-legged hut in the forest! Goodbye forever, foul Russian smell! Now am I perfumed and clothed in beauty, my eyes behind her eyes, my teeth behind her teeth. Everything she does is false, every word a lie, because here I am inside her, pulling her strings, casting the web of her words and deeds around the little fly, the old fool. He believes she loves him! Ha ha ha ha ha! Cackle, cackle! That’s a good one, that is. (...) I conceal this voice deep inside myself, so deep that she, myself, can convince herself she cannot hear it, that it is not her truest voice. At the level of the skin, of the tongue, a different voice speaks, and she tells herself a different story, in which she is virtuous and her deeds are justified, both absolutely, by moral standards, and empirically, by the events around her. By him, the old one, the king in the golden house, who he is, how he treats her, what his faults are. But there it is, the deep voice speaking, commanding her at the deepest level, the level of the molecules of instruction, twined into the four helical amino acids of her being, which is also mine. It is who I is. It is who she am.

By calling yourself American, European, Russian, Asian or anything else, you destroy the very fabric of humanity.

Все же с горки дальше видно, Шире кругозор... Как равнине ни обидно, Это – свойство гор.

[Anton] Chekhov's wisest characters arrive not a final answers, but at a deeper understanding of questions.